Scratching the Surface of the State of Scrum 2015

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Scrum  

Let me start by saying you should absolutely read the latest State of Scrum report (you can get a copy here). I’m going to try and highlight some of the aspects that are more relevant to the larger project management community, and offer some thoughts on what the results might mean.

Let’s start with just a few basic demographic items. Over 4,400 people responded to the survey, working in 108 different companies and representing more than 14 distinct industry groups. Many different job roles were represented, with ScrumMasters being the largest group, but also with executives, team members and all levels in between. Interestingly, the second largest respondent group was project managers--a role that isn’t part of the Scrum approach. As expected, IT was the job area most commonly represented with more than three-quarters of people identifying themselves as either working in software development or IT. However, when it comes to industry, only 29% said they specifically worked in IT companies, with strong representation from finance, healthcare, government, telecoms and insurance among others.

PMOs help Scrum!
I want to start with one of the survey findings that struck me as the most surprising--the idea that PMOs help Scrum to succeed. One of the questions asked about the percentage of occasions that Scrum projects succeeded, and the response averaged out …

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